“We miss the life of days gone by, the pressed fruit-cakes, the figs, the myrtles and the sweet new wine, the olive trees, the violet bed beside the well.”
Euripides in his attitude toward nature has all the qualities of the other tragedians except sublimity, to which he more rarely attains. Many qualities are much more conspicuous. His range of colour is wider. His allusions to rivers and to the plant and animal world are more detailed. Picturesque scenes and setting delight him. Beyond all this the reflection in nature of human emotion, occasional in his predecessors, plays in his verse almost a leading part. Modern romanticism, in short, is no longer exceptional.
Hippolytus, the acolyte of Artemis, and his attendants address the virgin goddess who ranges the woods and mountains and who, as Æschylus says, is “kindly unto all the young things suckled at the breast of wild-wood roaming beasts.” The “modern” element in the original loses nothing in this paraphrase by Mallock:—
“Hail, O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one!
Lo, in my hand I bear,
Woven for the circling of thy long gold hair,
Culled leaves and flowers, from places which the sun
The Spring long shines upon,
Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze,
Nor any grass is mown;